


The Red Hourglass

by TheHawkandhisSpider



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Clint Barton, BAMF Natasha Romanov, F/M, Friendship, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Marriage, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, Protective Clint Barton, Romance, True Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 10:29:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19990654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHawkandhisSpider/pseuds/TheHawkandhisSpider
Summary: "She is mine." How the people around Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov leaned that the two assassins have been secretly married for years.Multi-chapter fic that spans several years.





	The Red Hourglass

The sound of a massive explosion rippled through the comms, causing the three heavily armed agents to rip them out with scowls on their faces and pained yelps resounding in the dark hallway.

Except for the fourth person, leading the group.

“Widow? Come in!” Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, all but screamed into his communication device.

All he got was a crunching, static noise. 

“Hawkeye for Black Widow! Come in! Damn it. Tasha? Can you hear me?”

Nothing.

“Sir…” Agent Cain, one of the three men trailing behind the archer started. “We need to get going. The mission objective….”

His voice came to a halt when Hawkeye, one half of Strike Team Delta and one of SHIELD’s most vicious agents, turned around and zeroed his steel blue eyes on him. Clad in his sleeveless black tac suit, a deadly looking black bow and quiver slung over his back and shoulders, a gun strapped to his right half and four razor sharp combat knives on his belt, he was covered in sweat, blood and grime. 

“We will not leave Agent Romanoff behind.” he hissed.

The three agents looked at each other. Of course everybody knew of the special bond between the two members of Strike Team Delta. Hawkeye, one if not the best marksman out there, and Black Widow, a former Red Room agent. Both highly trained spies and assassins, who mostly worked together, rarely being teamed up with other members of SHIELD. Wherever Natasha Romanoff was, Clint Barton was not far behind and vice versa. Her red and his blonde hair could be often seen close to each other, their eyes communicating silently, making it impossible for others to know what they were thinking. 

Many people at SHIELD were strangers to such an amount of private and professional intimacy and felt uncomfortable being close to them. At the beginning, when Barton had recruited Romanoff into the organization, defying all orders, most of their fellow agents had avoided her at all costs and had been openly hostile to her. But whenever somebody crossed a certain line, the Hawk would emerge from the shadows and literally let hell rain down on the perpetrators. People who had been used to his friendly and mostly polite personality for years, had to come to terms with the fact that whenever Barton felt that Romanoff was treated wrongly, he would let go of all pretence turning into a predator who was fiercely protective of his partner. Nobody knew the exact status of their relationship, but seeing Agent Barton going loose at the seams right now because of her unknown whereabouts, unveiled a rather raw level of feelings. 

Suddenly gun shots rang through a hallway further down, causing Hawkeye to turn back around to pull out his bow and nock an arrow at nearly inhuman speed. 

“Widow? Tasha! Come in” he tried again.

“Clint….” a female voice whispered hoarsely. 

Barton’s whole body came to a halt, his arm and shoulder muscles coiling up abruptly. He was grabbing his bow so hard that his knuckles were turning white.

“Natasha.” the hardened assassin choked out. 

“Status?”

“Got hit by an explosion. Some stupid dumbfuck dropped a grenade.”

Despite her calmly spoken words, the Widow’s voice was laced with pain. 

“I am coming to get you.” Hawkeye said, his steady voice betraying the lines of worry in his sweaty face. 

“Don’t…”the former Russian spy murmured tiredly.

“Shut the goddamn fuck up, Nat. I am coming to get you. You stay awake. Fuck, don’t you dare fall asleep on me!” Barton bellowed while starting to run, his bow ready in his left hand. 

The three other agents wordlessly followed suit, their eyes and guns trained on the surroundings. 

“Nat? God damn it, Romanoff! You better keep talking or I’ll kick your ass back to Russia!” Barton sneered as he rounded a corner.

“You…wouldn’t..You’d…miss..me…too..much..” Natasha whispered.

Both of them seemed to have forgotten that everybody could listen to their conversation.

“Don’t you dare go all sweet on me now, you fucking coward!”

“Clint….if…I….you….know…I…” she started, but got interrupted harshly.

“Don’t you dare telling me that now. You will say that to my face. You fucking hear me?” Hawkeye viciously growled. 

“Sir! There!” one of the other agents motioned quietly with his hands.

A slew of dead bodies covered the hallway in front of them. Most of them ripped to pieces in an apparent massive explosion that had caused half of the walls and ceilings to crumble.

“Natasha!” Barton whispered.

A weak groan could be heard under a pile of rubble. Barton checked the surroundings within milliseconds, before he holstered his bow and arrow, ran over and dropped to his knees next to his partner.

Half of Romanoff’s body was buried under stones and debris. Her left arm was obviously broken and she was bleeding from a cut on her forehead.

But it was the metal pole sticking through her gut that had Barton suck in a shallow breath. 

“Hey birdbrain.” the Widow whispered, blood trickling out of her mouth.  
“Hey hot sauce.” Clint replied with a hoarse voice. “Are you having fun without me?” His voice was steady, but his hands examining her wounds were trembling slightly.

She coughed weakly, but managed to lift a cocky eyebrow. Her face was completely unguarded and her eyes were solely locked on the archer.

“Coulson, we need Evac ASAP. Widow is down and I can’t move her.”

“Copy that, Hawkeye. ETA five minutes.” Coulson’s calm voice crooned through the comms. 

Five Minutes. 300 seconds. A myriad of heartbeats. A concert of breaths.  
An eternity. 

Clint made a low animalistic, near feral noise as his hands came back covered in warm blood after checking his partner’s injuries. 

“Tash…” he tried to say in a comforting voice, but failed miserably. 

Clint Barton was paralyzed with fear. It was not the first time one of them had been gravely injured, closer to death than life. It was their job, their everyday routine. 

But something in Natasha’s eyes turned his insides  
into painfully churning masses of ice. His lungs felt as if he could not expand them properly and a staccato of pain was building up behind his forehead. 

“I need you to stay awake, okay?” Clint harshly  
whispered as he tried to still the steady blood flow.

Her breaths grew laboured and out of the corner of his eye he could see her fingers reaching for his left hand. Her lips moved tiredly, but no sound came out.

“Don’t try to talk. You need to save your strength.” Clint pleaded. “You..”

His voice got stuck in his throat when he felt the tips of her fingers caress his right ring finger and the tiny red symbol etched into it, her dimming eyes never leaving his.

“No…” he pleaded. “Please, no.” 

His voice sounded small, forlorn and scared, shaking their surrounding team members to the core. All of them were battle forged agents, but seeing their team leader crouched over his possibly dyeing partner, made it hard to breathe. 

Suddenly the tell-tale sounds of an approaching helicopter cut through the silence.

And Natasha Romanoff took a deep breath, her chest heaving with precious oxygen and then she just….stopped. 

Before Clint could register her slack hand in his, before he could call out her name, before he could pull her back from wherever she went to without him, a team of six medics roughly pushed him aside with slightly apologetic looks and immediately began to work on Natasha’s limp body.

All he could to was to stand aside, the skin of his hands burning with the heat of her rapidly cooling blood. When Coulson appeared in front of him, his usual calm demeanour and pristine suit slightly rumpled, clutching Clint’s shoulders, he recoiled as if he had been hit with a whip. 

“I need to…” he began, but failed to form a coherent sentence. His mind failed to wrap around the fact that it was his partner bleeding out on the ground. Pale, unmoving and barely responsive to the efforts of SHIELD’s medical team. 

Coulson knew better than to initiate further body contact with one of his two best agents or he risked a ripped off limb or broken bones. 

Barton’s muscles were tense under his tanned skin and his eyes were fixed on Romanoff while they were hauled into the helicopter. 

“Phil.” Clint’s deep voice suddenly sounded left from his handler.

“What is it?” Phil replied with a calm voice. He tried not to show his surprise. Though close, Clint tended to retreat into his own world when Natasha was injured. Him initiating a conversation in a moment like this was highly unusual.

“Remember the mission in China when Nat and I infiltrated a child trafficking conglomerate?”

“You mean the mission in Beijing six years ago? I remember losing contact with you two and locating you one week later in a small mountain village. You had a broken arm and Nat a severe concussion. The villagers had hooked you up on some traditional pain medication. You two were high as a kite. Good times.”

Barton nodded, his eyes solely focused on the bleeding body in front of them. 

Suddenly Coulson saw a red symbol flashing on Barton’s right hand. Normally, it would have been hidden under his armguard and shooting glove, but Clint had pulled them off to wipe the blood from his hands on his already soiled pants. 

“Clint, what…” the handler started, but was interrupted by the archer. 

“We got married in that mountain village. Filed all the necessary paperwork when we touched back on U.S. soil. Told Fury and Hill.”

It happened rarely that Phil Coulson was speechless. The last time he could remember had been when he had heard Natasha laugh wholeheartedly for the first time since she had joined S.H.I.E.L.D. She and Clint had been sparring, when he had managed to get the upper hand and wrestled her to the ground, he had been absolutely dumbfounded. Besting the Black Widow was rare. Sitting atop Natasha with huge eyes, her wrists locked in his strong fingers, he couldn’t help but gape at her. 

It had started with a low rumble in Natasha's chest, working itself upwards into a small gurgle in the throat and then exploding into honeyed giggles. Her eyes had been scrunched up in mirth when she had grinned up at her partner. 

Something had changed in Clint Barton’s eyes in that moment. Coulson had been aware of the escalating physical attraction between Hawkeye and the Black Widow since the day they had been teamed up as Strike Team Delta. It was a partnership forged by blood, sweat and tears. 

But when Hawkeye had been gazing down at the former Russian spy with slowly darkening blue eyes, Phil Coulson had felt across the room that the axis of the archer’s world had been tipped. It seemed as if something had clicked into place, as if an invisible weight had been pulled off Barton’s shoulders. He had gotten up to his feet, pulling Natasha up with him. But he had not let go of her. Instead the two most vicious assets of the agency had been staring into each other’s eyes, their foreheads nearly touching. 

A screeching sound pulled him back from his thoughts.  
“Code 0. She is flatlining. I need 2mg of Adrenaline. And get me that damn defibrillator.” one of the medics shouted.

Barton turned white as a sheet, his eyes glistening with unshed tears. 

He glanced helplessly at his handler. 

Despite being armed to the teeth and wearing his black tac-suit, he looked so lost. 

“Tasha…I…my wife…” he all but croaked, a feral noise escaping his chapped lips.

Coulson put his hand on Clint’s shoulder.

“We wait.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comment and enjoy !


End file.
